1. Technical Field
The present disclosure relates to the protection of proprietary or sensitive data stored on computing and other electronic devices by deletion thereof following the theft or loss of such a device.
2. Description of the Related Art
Proprietary information is routinely stored on electronic computing devices such as personal computers, laptop computers and personal digital assistants, and the need to protect such proprietary or sensitive data from theft or misuse is self-evident. Accordingly, in addition to the use of basic encryption techniques and on-line monitoring systems, various systems and methods addressing the need to detect the tampering or theft of an electronic computing device without the device having to be connected to the internet at the time of tampering or theft have been proposed.
U.S. Patent Publication Nos. 2005/0216757 and 2006/0272020 describe a tamper resistant servicing agent for providing various services such as data delete upon receipt of an instruction transmitted to it.
U.S. Pat. No. 7,421,589 describes a system and method for destruction of data stored on a lost portable electronic device. A client computing device communicates periodically with a server. If communication is not established between the client and the server for a selected activation interval and a subsequent grace period, data is determined to be lost, and programmed security rules, such as data deletion rules, are automatically executed.
A drawback with existing solutions for the protection of data is that they do not distinguish between the data belonging to the original owner or authorized user of the device and the data that may be later stored on the device by a bona fide purchaser, who could unknowingly have bought the device from a thief.